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University Offers Course To Help Sniff Out and Refute 'Bullshit' (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: There's now a course at the University of Washington, "Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data" that helps you find bad information and show others why it's bad. The instructors, Professors Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom, jokingly write that "we will be astonished if these skills do not turn out to be among the most useful ... that you acquire during the course of your college education." They add that the intention is not to be political, as "both sides of the aisle have proven themselves facile at creating and spreading bullshit." The intention, then, is to arm students (and the public if they want) with the tools to combat a scourge of misinformation that's aided and abetted by social media.
They already had this. It's called citing your sources and peer review. We also used to have open discussions but those got shut down in favor of safe spaces. Now you can't say shit without some snowflake getting their feelings hurt because, you know, feelings are more important than the truth and stuff.
I just use the old adage about how you can tell if a politician is lying...his lips are moving. I just assume most stories have elements of fabrication in them, especially if it's a social cause. Most writers are writing with an agenda so you need to consider their angle. It's not to inform you.
You think more curriculum and snobbery will solve this problem? Do tell!
I call bullshit on this...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Schools should teach all pupils to be able to spot fallacies, and encourage them to castigate those who use them. A world without fallacies would be a world where trump couldn't be president.
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Among members of the football and basketball teams, and pre-meds trying to preserve their 4.0.
A so-called "classic" book called "How to Lie With Statistics" was published before I was born (and I'm old). That book has had plenty of successors.
In previous generations, the course would have been called something like "Identifying Propaganda and Testing the Accuracy of Information". But for me, when I see the phrase "calling bullshit" in the course title, I can't help but suspect that the course itself is bullshit.
A conventional lie is detectable because of the network of falsehoods that must necessarily support a consistent sounding alternative picture of the world. Often the best way to detect a liar is to invite him to elaborate on his statements, until the entire fabric of falsehood is unsupportable.
Bullshit doesn't try to create an elaborately self-consistent fabric of false beliefs. Bullshit doesn't even bother being consistent with itself. Bullshit persuade through the power of how it makes you feel in the moment, and as a bullshitter rattles on he keeps his audience enthralled moment by moment even as he contradicts himself.
So to detect lies you need epistemological skills. To detect bullshit you need strength of character.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's all bullshit-by-omission, that's how large number statistics works. So when someone attempts to imply causation, just ask what the outliers were.
I thought that was the point of going to university.
https://xkcd.com/927/
1. College is the only means of success in modern society. trade schools and vocational professions are unsuccessful.
2. college debt is normal, and shouldnt be questioned. you will become successful after college.
3. college atheletes are students and not paid performers, despite lucrative contract deals with advertisers and meaningless classes.
4. college deans command high salaries because they work hard and get results.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
- John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Now I can get my official degree as a bullshit-detector.
So they're going to do a grounding in statistics and graphing then? I've seen both regularly used to deceive the public.
Part of the problem is that people can't detect BS. The other part is that they don't care. Once people have chosen a side, they tend to ignore information that disproves their assumed position. How do we deal with that problem?
This seems like a good exercise in critical thinking, but it's a bit late ... shouldn't this be taught as a part of, say, language arts, sciences, etc. in the earlier grades? Even math should be poking at fallacious "divide by zero yields anything" proofs.
Still, better late ...
This kind of course is amazing for those who are already looking to stretch their minds and fact-check their own beliefs. For people who are new to the idea and attend the course, it could potentially inoculate them against falling for stupid shit again and again.
... why a claim is bullshit." It won't help with the constant stream of false, gut-reactionary posts and images that are shared on Facebook.
The big problem is that this inoculation is non-transferrable. This course will not be as helpful as you would think in showing your "casually racist uncle
First you have the Backfire Effect, where when someone's deepest convictions are challenged their beliefs get stronger. Your uncle probably shared that stupid post because it "felt right". Arguing against the facts of that particular post will often alienate him and cause his beliefs to be more firmly entrenched.
Still, I am glad this kind of class is being offered.
"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a targeted advertisement" - Adam Harvey
Every society whether western or eastern is based up a collective shared system of beliefs (aka bullshit) that is necessary for different individuals to coalesce and form society. We are all brainwashed. Those that are convinced they are not are the most brainwashed. They are swimming soo close to the sea that they cant find the water. The trick is the find the right amount of brainwashing that will allow your society to thrive. You can laugh at religious fundamentalists, but their properly proportioned level of bullshit allowed them to defeat and wipe out the less worthy and societies that believed in such bullshit like 'the power of the state and secular humanity.'
Social animals need bullshit to survive. If we don't support our own (nationalistic | tribal | clickish) bullshit another society will come and impose IT's bullshit on our society and our bullshit end up in the shit can.
We need bullshit.
Horray for Bullshit
Detecting fallacies is fine, but castigation presumes a certain value judgement. Get out of my safe space with your obvious pro-truth bias!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
If kids could detect bullshit, wouldn't that undermine the entire student debt serf system?
unfortunately, it won't work. Curmudgeons are born, not trained. They grow with a natural talent for figuring out what is bullshit and trying to educate those around them. But, it's not society's way to call "Bullshit" on things that the majority have already accepted so the typical curmudgeon becomes a voice crying in the wilderness finally to reject society, retire to their porches and swear at people who come too close. "Hey, you, get off my lawn."
What we need is AI that can do automated story/fact credibility analysis.
Google is in the best position to develop this these days, maybe in a collaboration with IBM.
Then is should be released as OpenAI so that people will believe the system's results.
The system should consider factors such as:
1) Logical/factual compatibility of statement/story elements with scientific/subject expert well accepted consensus knowledge.
2) Logical coherence of statement/story
3) Use of terms with clear unambiguous meanings from well-accepted theories/models of the world or aspects of it.
4) Utterance theory: a theory of people and organizations as motivated actors with preferences and goals.
Of course in human society one way to achieve one's goals is to influence the focus of attention, beliefs and behavours of other people and organizations.
Uttering particular statements or stories (in particular situation contexts) is an effective way of influencing focus of attention, beliefs, and behaviours of others.
So any system assessing credibility of statements/stories must be able to reason about who the utterer / source is, what their situation is, what their goals for attention, belief, behaviour influence are, and what the situation, disposition, and prior knowledge of the intended audience is.
5) Theories of framing as a means of belief crafting and attention focussing and behavour influence. This is a particular sub-part of 2.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Happy that someone has stepped up and offered something meet an obvious need.
Sad because the need exists. When did basic critical thinking stop being something that even freshmen university students came already equipped with?
Detecting the difference between lies, exaggerations, BS, sincere-but-false claims, and facts should be taught on an age-appropriate basis from birth through adulthood, at home, in school, and in life.
For school-aged children and teenagers, this doesn't have to be a formal class every year, it can be integrated into the curriculum across most or all disciplines.
Ditto for detecting the difference between a sound argument and an unsound argument and the difference between an unsound argument that leads to a false conclusion and an unsound argument that leads to a conclusion that happens to be true anyway.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Simple to detect, really
Next year we find out that everyone who took the course has since dropped out of college...and no one bats an eye at the irony.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
When I was in college in the early 1990's, students had the choice of two instructors for the Intro to Psychology course: the instructor who taught it straight up or the instructor who screamed bullshit all the time. I took the instructor who taught it straight up and enjoyed the class. I had a friend who took the other class and she hated it because of the bullshit that the instructor pulled all the time.
The greatest benefit Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could leave to human kind is to use most of their money to fund a global free press foundation.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
never stand for it.
Their younger kids would learn to question Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the line "because I said so!" from their parents. Then when they got into more advanced classes in BS detection, they would start to raise uncomfortable questions regarding DARE classes, pep rallies, flag salutes, and religion.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Early on in my career, it was necessary to work within the corporate world. There is no better way to hone one's bullshit detector than parsing the various communications from Management -- especially anything emanating from Human Resources.
"nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest use to you in after life â" save only this â" that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view is the main, if not the sole purpose of education"
Well played, most excellent troll! I laughed a hearty guffaw, and for that I thank you.
Politicians in general have not been very good at the truth and stuff. Now at least there's some transparency.
You've made good progress.
The first step in getting un-addicted to bullshit is to recognize that you're swimming in it.
Worthy goal: Design means of facilitating harmonious prosperous global (tribe-de-emphasized) human society with
-ethos of decreasing inequality
-ethos of decreasing ecological harm of human civilization
-ethos of maximum liberty consistent with previous two tenets
-ethos of recognizing and denigrating bullshit in all its vari-shaded brown forms.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a bullshit course.
#DeleteFacebook
It's not as if B.G. and W.B. weren't themselves biased...
The greatest benefit Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could leave to human kind is to use most of their money to fund a global free press foundation.
Yeah, with Democrat cronyist leftists like Gates and Buffet funding it there's no way it would have an ideological bias.
Do you have ESP?
Smells like bullshit.
Now where is my certificate of course completion?
In our post-modern society, we are shaped by our family and friends. To determine what is true, we rely on family and friends to help us. There is no longer any authority that we trust to tell us the truth. That make it harder to fight against fake news. I still believe that the facts are the facts and the truth is the truth, but we end up in these larger bubbles with friends and family miss out on hearing alternate viewpoints. That makes it easier for fake news to delude us and harder for us to determine the truth. We need to listen to the alternate viewpoints even if we disagree. I think that broad background along with critical thinking will help us determine whether a story is fake news or not.
If someone uses fake news then by definition they're not a progressive.
Thank you so much. Funniest thing I've read all day. Whew! Good one.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
And they called it that. Recently there's been a movement to cut down on this kind of teaching in favor of more on the job training. This is a reaction to that.
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that you have to teach people how to detect bullshit.
It goes against the very definition of progressivism. If someone uses fake news then by definition they're not a progressive.
Yup. And no Muslim would commit acts of terror.
Funded by liberals. What a great idea.
That is correct since then by definition they're not a Muslim.
It must be working already, and I'm not even taking the course; I can smell the bull**** already.
Their course was singled out as Bullshit as a result.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Yeah, and when Trump is caught, he doubles down. We have never seen anything like this from any President before.
And all the folks saying other Presidents were bad too are just wrong.
It may be taught in a classroom. But hanging out in pool halls, school yards, used car dealers, etc can give you practical knowledge.
You really think it makes a difference?Tell me, just how far has all this fact checking bullshit gotten us?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I think Logical Fallacies needs to be a high school class everywhere for the future of humankind.
Far too many people today aren't interested in the truth. The truth is difficult, inconvenient, hard and sometimes undermines our alignment with our tribe. Why bother with that?
It's far easier to simply go along with a tribal affiliation. "Our tribe is great! Our leader is great! Everything we say and do is the greatest! Even when we lose, we lose in a noble cause!!"
Other than the weather* and maybe traffic reports, quit reading / watching what passes for the news these days.
It ceased being ' news ' a long time ago and evolved into sensationalism designed to grab as many viewers as it can.
Even the Weather portion you have to take with a grain of salt. Especially if there is a hurricane or similar event going on. The media tend to cause more hysteria than anything.
In my opinion, being misinformed is worse than being non-informed. The latter doesn't tend to whip folks into a frenzy like the former can.
Quit watching / reading their bullshit and the problem will quickly fix itself.
A quote from the syllabus:
" Not only did fake news play a substantive role in the November 2016 US elections, but recently a fake news story actually provoked nuclear threats issued by twitter."
Now, is there any evidence that fake news played ANY role in the November 2016 election, much less a substantive one? And the claim of that it actually "provoked nuclear threats" is really exaggerated nonsense if you paid attention to what actually happened. In short - how do you call BS on this BS? One place to start is to assume that if something is spun to grab the tail of a current internet meme chances are the folks promoting it are just taking advantage of the meme to package their product which if honestly presented wouldn't be very interesting. Sort of the way a lot of news stories work.
Ha ha, and having a United Nations will bring world peace, right?
Funded by liberals. What a great idea.
Well, yeah!
Liberals are the only ones who don't lie and deceive for partisan political and ideological reasons. What, you want it funded by those lying, racist, greedy, and misogynistic conservatives?
I think the millions of lives they've saved in the Third World count for something too...
When I was in college back in the 80s, I took a humanities course that studied the manipulations and deceptions of MSM. Boy were my eyes opened. I learned real fast how to weed out misinformation.
A course like this should be mandatory in grade school. But as long as public schools are under control of the liberals, they won't allow it.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
yet another example of a bullshit class that students will be paying for in future dollars (loans)
The US cultural identity is a waterfall of misinformation, telling every citizen the rest of the world is wrong because: The USA has the best, capitalism is perfect, small government is perfect, might is right, criminals/terrorists and welfare mums don't have rights, job creators have extra rights, everyone else hates freedom, Americans have freedom, God bless America.
You want to teach critical thinking, start by attacking the self-righteous delusions Americans teach themselves.
Ah Slashdot ID envy! Mine is smaller than yours!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This past election cycle both of the major parties used weaponized BS spreaders, carpet bombing the American public into submission or indifference. In a better world (perfect seems not to be an option..) people would have tools at their disposal to create functioning BS detectors of their own and call it when it flies by.
Eliminate transgender bathrooms in the university. Men's room for men, ladies' room for women... anything else is 'bullshit'.
Well, ok, but for the sake of argument, between Trump's NS (natural stupidity) and the AI of a decade from now, I know which one I would pick.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
the first to welcome our new automated overlords, and I hope they keep that in mind.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Here is the link to the actual course.
You say that 11% of Americans do not have government issued photo identification cards, but really, are we supposed to take them at their word that they are in fact Americans?
Alternative: about 11% of the people claiming to be American are actually illegal aliens.
Your fraud rate is way off. It isn't 44. Trump would like you to believe that a couple million illegal aliens voted, but the reputable number is "only" 800000 of them. Yeah, eight hundred thousand. That is enough to throw a state, and thus enough to easily change the outcome of an election.
The opposition to voter ID is simple. As long as fraud detection is prohibited, we can't detect the fraud. (well, statistically we can, see above, but we can't get an exact count) If we detect nothing, because we don't even try, then we're supposed to conclude that there is no fraud. Never mind the estimated 800000 illegal aliens who voted, because we can't actually count them one by one.
Of course, if we were able to detect fraud, then most of it would go away. You'd say "see, I told you so" while mysteriously the areas with lots of illegal aliens see much lower voter turnout. Hmmm. People don't cheat when they know the will get caught.
Put the BS filter on a politician's output (or most CEOs for that matter) and resultant output would be silence.
This made me think of Karl Pilkington's super power https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Find the Gender Studies classroom. You've hit the mother-load of bullshit.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Yes, more name calling. Your name suits you.
Spoken like an Alex Jones true believer.
And no true Scotsman.
If the school educated it's students, students could sort out the BS themselves.
The phrase "both sides of the aisle" is itself a political statement, and a bullshit one at that. The majority of the US are independent voters. The "first past the post" voting system is allowing this duopoly and false dichotomy to keep gasping for air. We need real chances for other parties and a real representational voting system to allow that. I support approve/disapprove voting.
I could take the prospect of the success of this course more seriously if I knew that UW 1) could identify BS, and 2) really objected objectively to it.
The best part of this course is their extremely useful advice: Don't Read The Comments
Basically, it's verify, don't trust, and realize the biases of your sources, establishing trust chains.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Um - libraries have been teaching this for decades. It used to be called research skills, then information literacy or media literacy or whatever ... But really, all it has always been is getting students familiar with the characteristics of reliable vs unreliable information. This is not new.
I'd like to comment on the Jeffrey Medford quotes, as I think they get part way to explaining our problem.
"I didn’t choose a side. They put me on one.”
Now really, I can't go along with this idea. No one "puts" you on a side, you get there on your own steam. Maybe you didn't much care for your choices, sure, and maybe you selected reluctantly, that I can understand. However if both sides were anathema to you, you'd boycott the political process, or start some kind of third party movement or something. Choosing however, is individual to you.
"You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump."
This is more interesting. We've all had the experience of supporting someone politically, with reservations. However this contest between "good enough" and "ideal" is always challenging. We only get to choose one candidate, not a left arm, a right leg, a torso and some hair. It's a package deal no matter what. So what do we do?
Well, we say that, "I'll support the specific initiatives my candidate proposes, and that I agree with. And I'll oppose those I don't agree with." Which sorta works, but too often doesn't work. It doesn't work well in parliamentary democracies for example, where the party in power has strong party discipline, and voting against your own leader leads to dramatic consequences.
And it's particularly problematic when it comes to the party leader, and the electoral contest is for a very powerful position like President of the United States. How do you put a check on the power of the President? Like it or not, the President is more powerful than you, and that is true regardless of who "you" are.
At any rate I'd only like to say, that I expect voters to take responsibility for their choices. Don't make excuses if your candidate doesn't work out; you supported them, you helped put them in power. It feels like a cop-out every time a voter says, "well I supported Prez XYZ but they sure disappointed me". And that's it? Your responsibility ends at "disappointment"?
They also serve as negative brands. If you want to tar the opposition with a brand, under which you can group most or all of them, negative branding is one way to go.
This goes back a long way, in case you are interested. Long before the current generation of politics.